Session Announcement: The Business of Brewing

Like sandlot baseball
players or schoolyard basketball junkies, many amateur brewers, including some
beer-brewing bloggers, harbor a secret dream: They aspire to some day “go pro.”
They compare their beer with commercial brews poured in their local pubs and convince
themselves that they’ve got the brewing chops it takes to play in the Bigs.
Some of them even make it, fueling the dream that flutters in the hearts of
many other home brewers yearning to see their beer bottles on the shelves at City
Beer or their kegs poured from the taps at Toronado.

Creating a commercial
brewery consists of much more than making great beer, of course. It requires
meticulous planning, careful study and a whole different set of skills from
brewing beer. And even then, the best plan can still be torpedoed by unexpected
obstacles. Making beer is the easy part, building a successful business is
hard.

In this Session, I’d like
to invite comments and observations from bloggers and others who have first-hand knowledge
of the complexities and pitfalls of starting a commercial brewery. What were
the prescient decisions that saved the day or the errors of omission or
commission that caused an otherwise promising enterprise to careen tragically
off the rails?